The Garden Plot (8 page)

“Jo, you won’t believe what I’ve got to tell you.” Pru gave a quick rundown of the morning’s events.

“No one would be murdered over a Roman mosaic, surely,” Jo said.

“It’s more than a mosaic. This could be huge,” Pru replied, envisioning the garden she could create around the ruins of a Roman villa.

“But the Wilsons will have to tell the earl before they can dig,” Jo said.

“Yes, the inspector told me about the earl. I suppose it’ll all belong to him, no matter how amazing the discovery.” Despite the murder, Pru couldn’t get out of her head the possibility of taking on a project bigger than anything she’d ever dreamed up. “Look, do you have time to meet me at the Cat at three?”

She had just ended her call when Malcolm spoke behind her.

“Pru?”

Pru jumped.

“Are you all right?” he asked, standing with his hands shoved in his pockets and bouncing on the balls of his feet. “It’s a terrible business, isn’t it? So, you found the body?”

She didn’t know if she was supposed to talk about the murder, but on the other hand, Pearse hadn’t given her a silence order. “Did you know Jeremy Pendergast,
Malcolm?”

“Oh, yes,” Malcolm said, “we all knew Jeremy. What was it like? Was he alive when you found him? Where was Harry? In the shed with you?”

This seemed too gruesome a subject, and thinking about the details made Pru slightly queasy again.

“Had anyone … disturbed anything? Did you see anything else in the shed?” Malcolm persisted.

Besides a dead body?
Pru thought. “No, I didn’t really have time to look around.”

“What about this mosaic—I couldn’t help but hear what you said on the phone …”
Yes,
Pru thought,
you couldn’t help but hear when you were eavesdropping.
“Is that what Jeremy and Harry argued about?”

Malcolm’s manner pushed Pru too far; she wouldn’t be the one to reveal the possibility of Roman ruins—she’d be stealing Mr. Wilson’s thunder. At least, she didn’t want to reveal the news to Malcolm.

“I don’t know, really. You should talk with the Wilsons or with the inspector. Maybe you saw someone in the garden? I don’t even know when he was killed, last night or early this morning.”

“Oh, someone was in the garden all right,” said Malcolm, sounding sure of himself. “Did you have any evidence for them? Anything to … show them?”

“I didn’t have anything to show them. All I could do was say that I found the body. Sorry, here’s my bus. I’ve got to run. I’ll see you soon, though.”

Pru stepped on the bus; as Malcolm watched her intently she dropped her phone in her pocket and pulled out her bus pass, called the Oyster card. As the bus pulled away, she looked up and saw Malcolm staring at her through the window.

Pru began the crown topiary transformation at the Nethercotts’ and took a stab at a light shearing for the lyres and peacocks. She had encouraged Helen and Gordon Nethercott to let her whack away at the yew, explaining that it was one of the few conifers that would grow from old wood. “I can cut right into these shapes now, and the new growth will pop out before you know it. It’ll be a fast start to the new look,” she said.

But they were hesitant to commit to such a drastic move. “We don’t really like the look of the bare wood,” Helen had explained as she and her husband stood there anxiously watching Pru, who held hedge clippers in her hand.

“Of course, of course,” Pru had said. “We’ll go slow.” She had turned away from them and rolled her eyes. Yew wood was a gorgeous dark red-brown that flaked off dramatically. Who could object to that?
Perhaps I could wave my magic wand,
she
thought,
and instantly transform the yew into a crown, lyres, and peacocks and make them dance around the garden.

She had to admit the slow clipping created a sense of calm after the morning’s drama and settled her queasy stomach. By the time she arrived at the Cat, she was more than ready for lunch; Mrs. Wilson’s sugary cup of tea being the last thing she’d had.

She gave Wilf a wave—he stood in a corner instructing a new barmaid on food composting. Pru had suggested the Cat and Cask sign up with a local company that collected kitchen scraps from restaurants and pubs, and Wilf had jumped at the chance to do his part to reduce the amount of waste heading to the tip—he also liked to use his newfound eco-consciousness as a bit of a marketing tool. It helped Pru, too: when she finished tidying the pots and window boxes, she could dump the spent flowers and wilted leaves in the bin along with the scrapings from plates.

When Jo arrived, Pru ordered a chicken salad plate and they each drank a half pint of bitter while she went through her morning again, this time in detail. Freshly shocked at the event, Jo fumed about a member of the Metropolitan Police treating Pru in such a fashion. Pru followed up with telling her about Malcolm at the bus stop; he obviously had been listening to her side of the conversation. They speculated on the murder, motives and method, and wished they knew more about everyone involved.

“You really don’t think it was because there might be Roman ruins in the shed?” asked Pru.

“Roman ruins?” Jo snorted. “Roman ruins are as common as dirt in London. You can’t move without tripping over a pile of pottery or a bit of a statue. They found Hadrian’s head in the Thames, for God’s sake.” She thought for a moment. “I’d say a fair number of Roman leftovers in London get discovered and then get undiscovered—covered back up again, lest the find hold up some building project. And if there is a villa under there, it didn’t belong to this Jeremy Pendergast.” Jo sat upright. “Pru, what if it was a random act? It could’ve been you—what if you had disturbed someone about to break in to the house …?”

“The person was already in the back garden, and the only way there is through the house or the basement,” Pru said. “And I would like to know what Jeremy Pendergast was doing back there again. I wonder if he and Mr. Wilson really did have an argument. But then he could just end their lease, couldn’t he, and the Wilsons would have to move.” Silently, Pru wondered if the Wilsons had money problems, as she did. The letter she’d seen in their house from appraisers—they could be selling off their belongings for quick cash. Perhaps Jeremy had given them a deal on rent, as the Clarkes gave her, and they couldn’t afford to move. Pru’s line of thought was leading her down a path she didn’t
like.

“I see all sorts of disputes over lets and sublets,” Jo said. “People may get turfed out, but the disputes don’t end up in murder.” She glanced at the time on her phone. “I’m supposed to go to Cordelia and Lucy’s for a meal—do you want to come? I’d hate to leave you alone tonight, thinking about all this.”

“No, I’ll be fine. I didn’t remember until I was leaving the Wilsons’ about all the photos I’ve taken—during the work and this morning when I got there. I’m going to download them and take a look. Maybe I have a photo of something that will help the investigation. You never know.”

She thought back to the murder scene and her discovery of the wet soil beneath the mosaic. Murder she couldn’t fathom, but wet soil, that’s something she understood.

“Jo,” she said, “could there be an underground stream or seepage or something at the bottom of the garden? Without anyone knowing about it?”

Jo looked thoughtful. “Well, they covered over the Fleet,” she said.

“You mean Fleet Street?” asked Pru.

“The river Fleet,” said Jo. “It was a sewer, I mean really a sewer, flowing to the Thames. It was covered over ages ago.”

“But this couldn’t be the Fleet, that’s over”—Pru waved her hand vaguely—“by Ludgate, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but there could be others.” She shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know, Pru, you’d be better off asking some historian.”

“I might just look into it,” Pru said. “It will affect whatever I do with the garden.” She took a breath. “Jo, anything from the Clarkes?”

Jo studied Pru’s face for a moment.
Gauging my tolerance level for bad news, no doubt,
Pru thought. “No,” Jo said. “There is no need to add something else to your list of worries—you just put them out of your mind.” She stood up, gathering her bag and phone to leave. “Pru, next weekend—come to the country with us. The Bennet-Smythes invite us all every year. The village has an autumn fête on Saturday, and there’s loads of room at the house. It’ll be good for you to get away … and we can go to Chedworth. You can become an expert in Roman villas.”

Pru made her way home and spent the early evening filling out more applications for jobs, one for Stanborough Castle, a small private estate in Yorkshire, and one for a large ravine garden in Cornwall. She had hoped to hear by now from a small garden near Royal Tunbridge Wells, Primrose House; she had applied several weeks ago. It had sounded the perfect size, just four acres—somewhere she could design, dig, plant, tend, and avoid
small-engine repair. The advert for Primrose House offered what most did for a full-time head-gardener post: regular hours, holidays, and—she loved the idea of this—a cottage of her own.

Pru’s dreams of cottage living, born of her mother’s stories of growing up in England in the 1930s and ’40s, had a vintage look. In Pru’s vintage cottage vision, someone sat across the table from her, drinking tea. She could never quite make out his face, but she felt sure they drank out of her mother’s Spode china—the blue-and-pink Queen Mary pattern, the last few pieces of which had been packed away carefully and stored at Lydia’s.

Memories of sitting and drinking tea with her mother in their kitchen in Dallas always comforted Pru. No matter what the temperature, their afternoons had been marked with this small ceremony. “There’s nothing cools you off better than a hot cup of tea,” her mother would say.

Pru’s dad had taken a decidedly different view. “In America,” he would say with a twinkle in his eye, and a quick glance at his wife, “we drink our tea with ice.” His proclamation notwithstanding, Pru kept close to her heart the sight of her dad, every afternoon after his retirement, sitting down in the kitchen for a nice, hot cup of tea.

Late in the evening and almost too tired to care, she remembered about the extra photos on her phone. She downloaded them to her computer and then put the entire set on a flash drive. As an afterthought, she did the same again and dropped both flash drives into her bag. She would take one to the police station and keep the other for Mrs. Wilson. But first she would take a look; she didn’t want to waste the inspector’s time.

She’d fallen into the easy digital trap—of snapping way too many photos for her needs. She clicked through quickly—overgrown and forlorn back garden slowly evolving to less overgrown and nearly barren back garden—until she got to that morning, the morning of the murder. A few shots of the front included a woman holding the hand of a young girl in a school uniform. The girl stood on a small scooter and glided along, pulled by the woman; another with the postman pushing his cart; and another with a large man in his sock feet.
There’s a sight you don’t often see in Chelsea,
she thought. She hadn’t been able to get a clear shot of the front at all.

Her eyes began to glaze over. She didn’t see any big clues jumping out at her, no murderer slinking along the wall or attempting to hide in a corner. Malcolm had moved his ladder, and she could tell in a couple of shots that he had been watching her from an upstairs window, but that was no surprise. The garden played a role in the murder, but perhaps only as a stage.

Before she shut the computer down, she searched for “Hodges & Hodges Appraisals,” just out of curiosity. She remembered seeing the letter at the Wilsons’ and wondered just what the company appraised.

Antiques, artifacts, and antiquities, as it turned out. Hodges & Hodges specialized in Greek and Roman statuary, artwork, intricate jewelry, and objects of beauty—all quite old, incredibly expensive, and passing from private owner to private owner for what, Pru could only imagine, amounted to vast sums, although the actual sums were deemed too crass to mention online. The sleek and subtle website didn’t shout the company’s importance so much as whisper it. Right smack in the middle of the home page a notice read: “A rare and exceptional opportunity to own a piece of ancient Rome. Please contact one of our associates to enquire on an upcoming private auction of this most incredible find. We will be accepting bids for the item in the near future.”

The next morning, Pru stopped by the Cat to freshen the window boxes on her way to coffee at the Wilsons’. She wondered if she’d have the chance to replant for winter.
Or will I be tending cacti, as Malcolm thinks we all do in Texas?
The thought of leaving England gave her a desolate knot in her stomach. Sure, she could stay in London and spend every penny of her savings, but if she’d found nothing by the time she got to the bottom, what then?

Wilf came out to her as she worked. “Pru, you aren’t leaving us, are you? Only, I saw Archie Clarke the other day.”

Pru stood stock-still with a broken branch of petunias in her hand. “What? No, they aren’t back, Wilf—they can’t be back. You saw him?” The Cat was the Clarkes’ local as much as hers, and they were known to Wilf.

Her forceful denial seemed to throw Wilf off base. “I don’t want you to go, Pru. Maybe they were only back checking on things.”

“No, Wilf.” Pru felt defeat sneaking up on her. “How could that be? They haven’t told me anything. Jo hasn’t told me anything.” Her breathing was shallow. “Are you sure it was him?”

“He wasn’t in the pub—I just saw him on the street. But maybe I was wrong.” Wilf shrugged.

Tragedy will bring people together, and this, she thought, must be why Mrs. Wilson had asked her round for coffee. She set aside Wilf’s sighting of Archie Clarke—maybe Wilf needed new glasses—and knocked at the Wilsons’ door, which set Toffee Woof-Woof off as much as the bell. She waited what seemed a long time for an answer, until Mrs. Wilson, slightly breathless, opened the door a few inches. Oh, no, Pru thought,
had she got it wrong? Or had Mrs. Wilson had second thoughts about her invitation yesterday?

“Oh, it’s you.” Mrs. Wilson opened the door wide when she saw Pru’s face. “We’ve had the most annoying visitors since this all happened. I didn’t want to answer any more questions.” She headed back to the kitchen and said over her shoulder, “Come through, dear. Harry is downstairs with his bits and bobs.”